Mumford (1999)

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SDG

"My method?" muses Dr. Mumford, the new
psychologist in the town of Mumford, who, in the film
Mumford, has been asked to dinner by the two established
therapists of Mumford (the town, not the psychologist or the
film). "I don’t have one really. Most of the time I’m faking it.
You see, I think there’s not much that can be done about most
problems. They’re too complicated, too deep-rooted by the time I
hear about them. The most I can do, usually, is look, listen
really closely, and try to catch some glimpse of the secret life
everybody’s got. If I can get a sense of that, maybe, just maybe,
I can help them out a little."

A brave admission for a psychologist speaking to his peers;
and all the braver in view of Mumford’s own secret life, and the
extent to which he really is faking it. If this doesn’t exactly
make it a brave premise for a film, at any rate it’s a promising
one. After all, this is what many of us, deep down, believe, or
at least suppose. The complicated theories of Freud and Jung
don’t resonate for us like homespun common sense, friendship, and
straight talk. Like Catholic philosopher Peter Kreeft, who once
gave "rent-a-friend" as a definition for psychiatrist, we
suspect that what most people really need is someone who will
actually listen to them, care about them, and give them an honest
opinion. That’s part of what makes Dr. Laura so popular.

I’m the same way myself. Recently when a friend of mine
wondered aloud why mechanics and plumbers should make as much
money as psychiatrists, my off-the-cuff response was: "Mechanics
and plumbers are skilled laborers who fix things sometimes. Why
should psychiatrists make as much money as they do?"

I rather expected to enjoy Mumford, a film written and
directed by Lawrence Kasdan, who wrote the initial draft of
Raiders of the Lost
Ark and whose credits include Silverado, The Big Chill,
The Accidental Tourist, and Grand Canyon.
Mumford promised feel-good comedy gently skewering the
pretensions of psychotherapy; and, indeed, does deliver some
memorable moments along these lines. This is the sort of film in
which a young woman with chronic fatigue syndrome is prescribed
long walks with the doctor, and the two of them take up a paper
route; and patients who irritate the doctor with their
intransigence are liable to get thrown out of his office.

Some of the best moments involve a character named "Skip"
Skipperton (Jason Lee), a gawky, unconventional billionaire
technology entrepeneur who skateboards around town like a less
image-obsessed and more bohemian version of Bill Gates: Skip
hires Mumford, not to analyze him, but simply to play catch and
hang around with him (which just might have been Mumford’s
prescription in any case). And by story’s end all of Mumford’s
patients and acquaintances have been tidily paired off with one
another in a sort of rolling happily-ever-after climax.

But the gentle comedy is marred, first of all, by jarringly
(and unnecessarily) graphic sex and nudity, especially in an
unpleasant flashback sequence involving explicit scenes of
adultery and cocaine use. This episode is so lurid that one is
tempted to wonder if the character telling the story isn’t making
it up for the benefit of his listener; until it’s confirmed, at
least in part, by subsequent events.

It’s hard to feel good, moreover, about how some of Mumford’s
patients wind up, at least without discarding moral
considerations. Consider Henry Follett (Pruitt Taylor Vince), an
unhappily bald and overweight pharmacist who lives in a world of
elaborate sexual fantasies, visualized in melodramatic
film-noir style with hard-boiled voice-over narration ("I
needed a stiff drink, a cold shower, and a hot broad"). To the
film’s credit, it doesn’t overlook the dehumanizing and
disenchanting effects that such fantasies invariably have on real
life: Asked about his ex-wife, Follett initially blusters, "I
left her because she didn’t satisfy me" — but at a barked order
from Mumford amends, revealingly: "She left me because I was
never satisfied."

Yet as far as Mumford is concerned, Follett’s real problem is
that he’s insecure, living his fantasy life as a muscular,
tattooed alter ego rather than as himself. The doctor’s rather
dubious therapy: a carton of trashy erotica, which (through some
psychological principle that’s never quite explained) somehow
liberates Follett, who goes on to gleefully imagine his balding,
rotund self in the same sort of breathless scenarios as before
("She had ways of making you feel better that they didn’t teach
you in nursing school"). Does this make you feel warm and squishy
inside? And since he’s now so comfortable with his sexuality,
he’s able to hook up with another one of Mumford’s patients, a
compulsive mail-order shopper (Mary McDonnell) who’s just been
abandoned by her jerk of a husband (Ted Danson). Did Kasdan
expect us to be so happy for them that we wouldn’t care that
she’s still married?

Follett isn’t the only male in this film who’s got a problem
with real women in real life. Skip Skipperton, the skateboarding
billionaire, has a secret project that despite misgivings he
reveals to Mumford: He’s developing "sexual surrogates":
synthetic, gender-specific, anatomically functional sex toys. In
his lab we see the partially constructed results of his labors: a
bare-breasted torso, a computer-animated female face mouthing
come-ons, a from-the-waist-down robot that Skip accidentally
activates, causing it to commence gyrating and moaning. Not
unreasonably, Skip is afraid that Mumford will be repulsed by
this, but the doctor is reassuring: "I think it sounds like a
good idea."

What about Mumford himself? Although his secret is hardly a
mystery and has been openly mentioned by many critics, I’ll
content myself here to observing that, while an individual in
Mumford’s shoes could be expected to commit some professional
blunders, nevertheless a man with a compromising secret is a man
in a vulnerable position, a man with something to lose. He is not
a man who is about to draw undue or critical attention to
himself, or do obviously unethical things, such as discussing
patients’ problems in public. The film makes him too smart for
him to also be that stupid.

Or at least, if he is that smart and that stupid — if he’s the
kind of person who aims high, goes far, and crashes hard, who
sets himself up for disaster — then he’s too complex and
contradictory a character to play straight man to this town of
eccentrics. And as played by Loren Dean, Mumford certainly is the
ultimate straight man. Dean hardly acts at all; he’s a cypher who
makes quiet observations and sensible remarks that elicit the
desired responses from those around him. And that would be fine,
if the redemption of those characters, or even of Mumford
himself, were more convincing.

There was potential in this film, but it’s been squandered.
Some of the characters have endearing qualities, particularly
Sofie (Hope Davis), the young woman Mumford takes for walks; Lily
(Alfre Woodard), a neighbor of Mumford’s who owns a café
but can’t find a good man, and of course Skip. It’s not hard to
play connect-the-dots and pair off likable characters with one
another. It’s harder to put them in a story that’s worthwhile.
This is a film without conviction, about a town full of people
with problems without depth, aided by a guru without soul.
Mumford is a fraud. Take that in whatever sense you like.